Tag Archives: Jesse Jackson

Skin privilege. When you’re black it seems the hardest thing to explain to whites. Even the most conscious or liberal whites sometimes don’t quite get it. Or as Langston Hughes once said, “A liberal is one who complains about segregated railroad cars but rides in the all white section.”

The killing of Trayvon Martin in February 2012 rang yet another alarm about the costs of that privilege. Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence tracks the case and explores why Trayvon’s name and George Zimmerman’s not guilty verdict symbolized all the grieving, the injustice, the profiling and free passes based on white privilege and police power: the long list of Trayvons known and unknown.

My right and my privilege to stand here before you has been won, won in my lifetime, by the blood and the sweat of the innocent.

Twenty-four years ago, the late Fannie Lou Hamer and Aaron Henry — who sits here tonight from Mississippi — were locked out onto the streets in Atlantic City; the head of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

But tonight, a Black and White delegation from Mississippi is headed by Ed Cole, a Black man from Mississippi; twenty-four years later.

Many were lost in the struggle for the right to vote: Jimmy Lee Jackson, a young student, gave his life; Viola Liuzzo, a White mother from Detroit, called “nigger lover,” and brains blown out at point blank range; [Michael] Schwerner, [Andrew] Goodman and [James] Chaney — two Jews and a Black — found in a common grave, bodies riddled with bullets in Mississippi; the four darling little girls in a church in Birmingham, Alabama. They died that we might have a right to live.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lies only a few miles from us tonight. Tonight he must feel good as he looks down upon us. We sit here together, a rainbow, a coalition — the sons and daughters of slavemasters and the sons and daughters of slaves, sitting together around a common table, to decide the direction of our party and our country. His heart would be full tonight…

One of the most impressive proposals advanced by President Barack Obama to aid college students is the creation of a new American Opportunity Tax Credit worth $4,000 in exchange for 100 hours of community service. While that program is still in the developmental stage, the Rainbow Coalition offers a plan that will immediately benefit students holding college loans.

We’re calling it “The Rainbow PUSH Education Stimulus Plan.” It is a simple-yet-sweeping plan to help families finance college costs that are steadily putting higher education out of the reach of most Americans. Our proposal is that students holding and applying for college loans should be offered interest rates that do not exceed 1 percent – the same favorable terms now being offered to large corporations under the federal bailout plan.

What we are seeking is fundamental fairness. Our nation’s largest banks and financial institutions – including Bank of America, Citigroup, and JP Morgan – are borrowing money from the federal government at a rate of less than 1 percent. However, students are generally forced to borrow for their education at rates in the range of 4 percent to 8 percent. Many are financing their education with credit cards that carry rates of 20 percent or higher.

Before graduating seniors can launch their families and careers, they are already saddled with excessive debt. To make matters worse, if students miss payments in this fragile economy, their credit score declines, forcing them to pay the highest interest rates for cars, homes and other necessities — if they can qualify at all. Yet, financial institutions with what is tantamount to bad credit reports are being rewarded with tax-supported, low-interest loans.

Lowering student loan interest rates to 1 percent directly addresses affordability, one of the most pressing problems facing our country. According to a report issued by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, the cost of attending college has risen nearly three times the rate of the cost of living. After being adjusted for inflation, college tuition and fees rose 439 percent from 1982 to 2007, far outpacing increases for medical care, housing and food. During this same period, median family income rose 147 percent.

As financial aid shifted from direct grants to loans, borrowing for higher education has more than doubled over the past decade. Meanwhile, the U.S. is falling behind in the global economy. Approximately 34 percent of young American adults are enrolled in college, putting the U.S behind Korea – which has a 53 percent rate – Hungary, Belgium, Ireland, Poland and Greece.

Moreover, by the year 2020, the United States will need 14 million more college-trained workers than it will produce, according to the National Center on Education and the Economy. A report issued by the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education at New York University observed, “We are losing ground and jobs to other countries – for example, China and India. Our nation’s ability to sustain long-term economic success increasingly depends on the very children we are not educating now.”

And the children we are not educating are mostly people of color. Every year, 1.2 million children do not graduate from high school. Of those, 348,427 are African-American and 296,555 are Latino. College graduation rates are equally dismal. Only 31 percent of Latinos and 48 percent of African-Americans complete some college, compared to 62 percent of Whites and 80 percent of Asians.

If we are to increase the college graduation rate for African-Americans, we cannot ignore economic inequality:

* The total median income for a White family was $64,427 in 2007. The total for a Black family was $40,143, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

* The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 6.1 percent of the overall U.S. labor force was unemployed in the third quarter of 2008; 11.4 percent of the Black labor force was out of work. Those figures are considered conservative by most economists and do not include discouraged people who have quit looking for work.

* 10.6 percent of the White U.S. population in 2007 lived below the official poverty threshold ($21,000 for a family of four), compared to 24.4 percent of the Black population, the data said.

Affordability takes on larger significance when one considers that the average annual cost of attending an in-state public university is $17,336. The figure for private universities is $35,374 per year.

The report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education found: “On average, students from working and poor families must pay 40 percent of family income to enroll in public four-year colleges. Students from middle-income families and upper-income families must pay 25 percent and 13 percent of family income, respectively.”

As we can see from the foregoing data, the issues of college affordability and access to higher education are inextricably linked to the very future of our nation. Placing a 1 percent cap on college loans will remove a major obstacle for millions of students who want to attend college but can’t afford it.

This week during the federal trial over North Carolina's restrictive voting law, the state elections chief testified that more than 96,000 citizens would have been blocked from voting in 2012 if the law had been in place then. Meanwhile, another expert testified that there had been a total of two cases of voter fraud in the state from 2000 to 2014. Imag […]

Since a white supremacist who waved the Confederate flag gunned down nine African Americans in a Charleston church last month, battles have raged across the South over the future of Confederate monuments. Some Confederate apologists are claiming that a 1958 law gives Confederate veterans, and thus the monuments to them, equal status to U.S. veterans and thei […]

As the growth of the South’s immigrant population transforms the region, the makeup of its immigrant communities is shifting, with Asian immigration now outpacing immigration from Latin America in several states. Image: Marchers at an immigration rally in Washington, D.C. in 2010. Across the country and in the South, Asian immigration has been on the rise. […]

A new study finds that child poverty has risen nationally, with over a quarter of children in the South living below the poverty line. But the region has also seen improvements in child health insurance coverage and in educational achievement. Image: The Annie E. Casey Foundation ranked the states in four child well-being categories. Shown here are the over […]

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan A stunning indictment has been handed down in Cincinnati, focusing attention again on police killings of people of color. Hamilton County Prosecutor Joseph T. Deters announced that University of Cincinnati Police Officer Ray Tensing has been charged with murder, for the July 19 shooting death of Samuel DuBose, a 43-year-old […]

In Ohio, a grand jury has indicted a University of Cincinnati police officer on murder charges for shooting Sam DuBose, an unarmed African-American man. Police officer Ray Tensing fatally shot DuBose on July 19, after pulling him over for not having a front license plate. In announcing the indictment Wednesday, prosecutor Joseph Deters called the killing […]

In a 2004 interview with Amy Goodman, Pete Seeger responds to rumors that he tried to pull the plug on Bob Dylan's electrified set at the Newport Folk Festival on June 25, 1965. For more, watch our 2014 special, We Shall Overcome: Remembering Folk Icon, Activist Pete Seeger in His Own Words & Songs.

Episode 264: BOOM! We’ve got a fantastic show for you this week! Dave, Coach, Mark, and Dan weigh in on the NFL’s decision to uphold the 4-game suspension for Tom Brady in the wake of the Deflategate scandal. Bijan C. Bayne, author of Elgin Baylor: The Man Who Changed Basketball, joins the show to discuss his upcoming book about the all-time great.

Episode 262: BOOM! We’ve got one heck of a show for you this week! As the dog days of summer approach, “Mean” Mark Barry tries to convince Dave and Coach to watch baseball. Dr. Brenda J. Elsey looks back on the Women’s World Cup and predicts the outcome of the USA vs Japan final. Finally catch Coach’s NBA free-agency breakdown.

Episode 261: BOOM! We’ve got an amazing show for you this week. Dave, Coach, and Mark prepare you for the 2015 NBA Draft and take a look at the top prospects. Dr. Cheryl Cooky discusses her latest study: “It’s Dude Time!" A Quarter Century of Excluding Women’s Sports in Televised News and Highlight Shows. Mike Geddes of Street Football World explains ho […]

House ethics rules bar lawmakers from accepting travel and related expenses from registered lobbyists. The House Majority Leader has said that his expenses on a 2000 trip were paid by a nonprofit organization, and that the financial arrangements for it were proper.

Five months after President Bush launched his drive to overhaul Social Security, the difficult, if not impossible, task of drafting legislation begins Tuesday when the Senate Finance Committee holds the first hearing on options to secure Social Security's future.

Years ago, the federal government spent $117 million on an experimental "clean coal" power plant in Alaska designed to generate electricity with a minimum of air pollution -- but the project never got up and running.